World Wide Web: The Future

Image via CrunchBase

The web has been going through lots of changes recently. However, I think the biggest milestones are represented by the social web, semantic web and real time web. The social web is of course all your social networks, like Facebook. These systems allow you to create a profile, share information, activity and stay connected with your friends or family. In the category social web, we can include also everything related to tagging: social bookmarking systems (like delicious) , photo tagging (like Flickr, Picasa) or people tagging.

The semantic web is a different issue. I would say that it is an initiative to better understand the huge amount of content on the web and to better interlink information. It is an additional layer on the web, allowing 3rd party applications to understand the content provided by users. Technologies like RDF, RDFa, OWL are in this category.

The third and most recent milestone is without any doubt, the real time web. I would define the real time web as the web where everybody becomes a journalist. Twitter is the key application here. You see or read something interesting, and you share it with your followers. If they like it, they retweet it. So your content can actually navigate from user to user, promoting you, since you appear in the tweet as the content provider.

Why is this important? As everybody becomes a journalist, Twitter becomes the heart of the ecosystem on the web. Take the recent huge earthquake in Tahiti last night. Tweets come from everywhere to ask people donate for the people there. For example:

MIC_09: RT @wyclef: Haiti is in need of immediate AID please text Yele to 501501 & donate $5 for earthquake relief. > To the few US followers I have

I think this is a major step, as even search engines integrate now results from Twitter. This is called social search, because behind the provided content there is actually a human being and it is recent.

As a researcher, I am always thinking about the next step. So what will be the next step for the evolution of the web. I am not giving an answer here, just a hint: a think we must bridge the gap between semantic, social and real time web!

As a final note, I would like to recommend you a content recommendation engine, called Zemanta. It helps you enrich your blog or other content with photos, links, and additional content. Every link in this post is actually automatically recommended and inserted by Zemanta!

Have a nice day!